


to the waters and the wild

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, HEA for Harry and Clara, Mental Health Issues, PTSD, Plantlock, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-03 23:44:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1759891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When John gets sent home, he comes to stay with his chatty sister Harry and her partner, Clara. Instead of writing in a blog, he starts a little garden to calm his nerves. Mike Stamford has a cutting he thinks John will get a kick out of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to the waters and the wild

“You were a doctor before you went to war,” Ella says, thoughtful.

John sits before her in his own chair, trying to keep his leg from making fretful jerks. “I’m a soldier.”

“Yes,” she agrees, writing _still identifies as_ … “But perhaps, while you heal, you can go back to your first passion, nurturing.”

John snorts his derision. His first passion. Like his life as a medical professional was a sport he’d played in his youth.

He imagines himself shouting: _how do you suppose I do that? I can barely get through the day without a panic attack._ He says instead, in a tight voice, “Between the tremor and the … rest of it, I’m not a surgeon anymore. Probably won’t ever be again.”

“I was thinking we’d start a little less daunting than that,” she says, with a tidy smile. “Although even if that’s true, that’s not the only way to practice medicine.”

John sits still, except his hand, curling, uncurling. What would you have me do? He wants to know, but is too proud to ask. Therapy for broken men: it’s not a chair he ever planned on occupying.

He must have asked with his eyes, and she answers. “Why don’t you get a dog? Sometimes when we don’t have the energy to take care of ourselves, we do it for something that depends on us.”

“No,” John says, in a final voice. “I’m staying with my sister out in the country. And even if I weren’t. I’m not … that sort of man.” Something inside of his feels cold at the thought of the mindless enthusiasm of dogs. Now, even the whistle of a tea kettle when John doesn’t expect it now has the power to send him ducking for cover.

“Well then,” she says, still smiling that gentle smile, “start a garden. Much less pressure to keep everything alive.”

*

Harry picks him up after, keeps a running chatter so he doesn’t have to. It makes him feel about fifteen again. It reminds him of when he’d tried, hopeful, to explain to his mother that girls were lovely, but he might feel like boys are also lovely. Then, and over and over again in the ensuing years, Harry had subverted so much ugliness with a casual application of diversion. He’d appreciated it until she came out at twenty two, well past when he needed her, and he spent the next half-decade hating her.

She was a master at it. Instead of asking him how therapy was, she tells him that she and her girlfriend Clara, well, they’re doing something or other, with someone or other. She pulls over and he arrives at the chilling conclusion that he has no idea what’s Harry’s said. He must have made the right noises, though, because she eventually parks in the drive, never having mentioned.

“Please just be calm,” she says, before she unbuckles herself. She’s small in the same way he is, but she wears it better. The daintiness of her bones and upturned nose look pretty on her. “And don’t go away when Clara talks to you.”

John realizes with an empty thump that his blankness hasn’t gone unnoticed, just covered up like everything else. “I’m trying,” he says, although he hasn’t been.

“It might frighten her,” Harry says, restless hands brushing through her hair, darker than his and more delicately complicated, and grins a little. “Her family is fantastically boring.”

Harry gives his hand a squeeze. “You might like her. You know we’ve always had the same taste in women, and she’s, well, she’s bloodly friendly. She’s relentless. It’s hard not to love her.”

He gets a picture of this Clara in his mind’s eye: an amalgam of every woman Harry’s dated since she came out in uni, when she started making up for lost time. Friendly, feminine, funny. Social. That’s the flame to Harry’s moth, and they all burn out  when they realize that Harry’s a bag of self destructive tendencies and mania, held together by stylish hair and spit.

"I’m trying," he repeats, before he realizes that doesn’t make sense. He struggles to engage and eventually fishes up: "I’m sure I will."

*

She’s not wrong.

Clara is chatty with him as she makes dinner, Harry sitting on a barstool at her laptop near by, as if to supervise. She asks him the mundane questions people ask on first dates, and John does his best to ground himself in his body, react appropriately, answer questions, ask some of his own.

“I saw this picture of the two of you,” Clara says excitedly, arms moving like a great gangly hummingbird all the while. “The two of you were so precious. I’ve been telling Harriet how the two of you should do one of those remakes, and now that you’re back in town...”

John tries not to frown at any of the things he wants to frown about it that sentence. “Ah,” he says politely, “do tell, which photo?”

His phone in his pocket vibrates, and it startles him. He’s not used to carrying one, and as Clara browns the meat, describing her new favorite photo as she does ( _you must be five and eight and Harriet is holding a fishing pole and John, you’ve got a little net, the whole thing is just so..._ ) he discretely takes out Harry’s old phone to check.

He has 1 NEW MESSAGE, and his one new message reads, _sorry johnny, told you she was normal._  

He replies, _She calls you Harriet?_ slanting his gaze at her with a smirk, and then tunes back in to hear Clara say “Wouldn’t that just be fetching?”

“ _Harriet_ ,” he pronounces with a wry grin, and Harry snorts, “and I might look a bit silly in overalls and bowl cuts, now.”

They’re like newlyweds, John can see, in constant orbit with each other. They’ve only been dating five months, John knows, because before he was invalidated, he and Harry had talked about it, but it’s strange to see them, seemingly old-oak settled out in the countryside, in a joined house with both sets of their old plates and glasses mingling on open shelves.

He leans heavily on his cane and is embarrassed of himself. Lately, there’s been no other way to be.

*

“Harriet’s told me so much about you. I’m glad to know you’re real.”

Because Clara’s everything he expected but nothing he doesn’t like: friendly, sensible, a little pretty, and obviously madly in love with his sister, he says, “Sometimes I don’t feel like it. I think I died out there, and everything’s just a mistake,” and makes a short quick stab at his salad, poking it in his mouth before he has a chance to say any other horrifyingly honest thing.

“You’ve just been hurt,” Clara says, matter-of-factly. “When I met Harriet, I didn’t feel real, either.”

Harry’s fork falls to the table with a quiet clink, gravity without force, like it’s slipped from her hands. “You didn’t seem hurt when I met you,” Harry says, puzzled.

Clara looked at her, smiling an endearingly gapped smile, and then at John. “That helps. Eventually you’ll meet someone who doesn’t notice that you’re broken. And then, eventually, you know, maybe you aren’t, or maybe it just gets bearable.”

Clara takes Harry’s hand and John looks away, his throat thick. He’s a cripple. They day that he finds phantom pains being in charge of his life bearable is not one he wants to live to see.

*

John lies awake in their spare room, staring at the ceiling. If he closes his eyes too long, he gets pulled into the past, because since he’s been shot, he’s discovered that time isn’t quite linear. He can let his guard down for seconds and suddenly, he’s there, his heart in his mouth and Bill’s palms hot and slick against his bloody shoulder.

Eventually, he might have fallen asleep, but when he startles into the realization that morning has arrived, lazy sun oozing through the crack in the blinds, his eyes are already open.

He rides into London with Clara in the morning. She works near the center of the city, but she drops him off by a flower shop on the way, and he wastes an hour just looking at things, trying to avoid the notice of the shop-girl, voice too cheerful, before he buys some things he thinks might be useful. Twine and little labels and some seeds for vegetables that the backs assure him are in season.

He gets in line, his items pressed between the crook of his arm and his hip, and stands awkwardly as the man at the till rings up the woman in front of him, with her potted flowers and soil, looking so cheerful that John feels his hand shake. And behind him, he hears his name, which is common enough to ignore until -- “John Watson!”

He winces, turning, wishes there was some way to hide his cane. “Er, hullo,” he says, trying to get a hand free enough to extend it before giving up with a shrug. “Ah, I’m sorry, you are?”

The man in front of him, portly and jovial, grins at him. “Mike Stamford. You were mates with my sister in uni,” he says.

John squints at him. “Now that you mention it,” he says, like a full sentence and with a grin he has to work at. “I knew a Stamford at Uni, but there’s not much resemblance.”

“Oh, John, I’m just pulling on your dick,” he says, with a genuine laugh. “I still went by Mary when we were in uni.”

John’s jaw makes a quick trip to the floor before it snaps back into place. “Um,” he says, wrong-footed and caught out. “Well,” he says, and huffs out an embarrassed laugh. “You still look fantastic.”

“Excuse me sir,” the cashier says, coughing politely, and John is grateful for a moment to collect himself, turning to set down his things on the counter. He turns back to look at the man who was his uni sweetheart.

“John,” he says, “You don’t seem like the gardening type. Aren’t you only in your element when you’re getting shot at or doing emergency tracheotomy?”

John shifts, feeling the heat rise to his face as he fumbles for his wallet to pay for his bag of miscellaneous gardening supplies. “I got shot,” he says, looking at his leg. It’s not where the bullet pierced him, but he can’t seem to convince it that it’s whole. As a doctor, he’s pretty sure that’s the ultimate failure.

“Sorry,” Mike says, deflating. “Let me buy you a coffee.”

John’s planned on wasting all day in town so he doesn’t have to take the tube (hot press of strangers, the jerky stop and go and flickering, humming lights) or a cab (expensive) back to Clara and Harry’s place. It’s not like he has anywhere he’s got to be instead.

And he remembers his time with Mary, no, Mike fondly, so for old time’s sake, he says why not. He waits for Mike to pay for his own purchases, before he follows him to a nearby cafe. Mike orders his coffee for him the way he likes it without asking, and they move back outside.

“Sorry about the shock, John,” Mike says, grinning around the rim of his styrofoam cup. “I’ve known what I am for a long time, but it took much longer to make peace with it and start living my truth. You can imagine, it’s not very often I want to dig up old memories. and people from the past.”

“I’m glad you did,” John said, assessing the man seated next to him. The dimensions of his body take up the amount of space they require, unapologetically. “You look much happier than when I knew you.”

“Thanks, John. That about sums it. What about you? You look...” he trailed off. John’s imagination helpfully filled in the silence with a lurid, jeering voice: Terrible. Like a cripple. Miserable. Like you got shot in the shoulder and it caused inexplicable limping. Like a man who isn’t a doctor or a soldier anymore, _what are you good for now?_

“Oh, God, John. Stop whatever it is you’re thinking.”

John’s shoulders angle defensively. “I look what,” he says flatly, like it’s not even a question.

“Ready to start growing your own crops, you dolt.”

He lets out a punched out breath. “Yeah, I guess. I... sorry, I’m a bit on high alert.”

“I can see that. Is that where the gardening comes in?”

John leans toward his old friend, his ex and isn’t that a strange thought, brow furrowed. “I’m seeing someone.”

Mike keeps looking at him with an open, curious face.

“I mean. A professional.”

“Ah. And your professional wants you growing… radishes and tomatoes?”

“They seemed like they could be useful.” John hedges, peering into his bag doubtfully.

Mike laughs. “They don’t seem like any fun.”

“I don’t think that’s the point of this exercise,” John says, and Mike gets an unholy look in his eyes. “What?”

“Nothing, sorry. I just. I’ve got something I think you could use.”

Mike leads him to his car, and John spends the whole walk feeling like a mouse caught on a sticky trap, thoughts blooming out in sudden, inexplicable panic for an excuse and finding nothing viable. Instead,  he gets in the car.

*

Clara comes home first, shedding her scarf, purse and coat before she’s fully opened the front door with a little huff. “Oh! Hello, John,” she says, startled. Somehow he’s made it into the house but that’s where his initiative seems to have left him, some kind of morose art piece installed in the foyer, still laden with bags.

“Uh.” he says, just as surprised. Oh John, he thinks, how did you end up here.

But Clara is some kind of miracle. She edges past him, hooking all of the bundled fabric in her arms on separate hooks. They have a truly magnificent coat rack a few feet from the front door, upon which hangs almost nothing Harry would wear. “Did you have a good time with your friend?” Clara asks, fluffing her hair with her fingers and steering him over to their sofa.

“Yes,” he says, bending his wooden knees.

Clara produces a basket from beside the couch, full of bundled yarn, and sets it on her lap. “Back in London for two days and you’re running into uni mates, how’s that for good fortune.”

John grips his cane. “Yes,” he agrees uncertainly.

“Would you like some help in the morning with the yard? If you’re hoping to get started tonight, I can’t offer you any assistance,” she says, having left her spindle heels at the door to squish her feet against the plush carpet. “I’m completely useless after work.”

“I don’t have any immediate plans,” John says, watching Clara spread out a fat tangle of yarn across her lap.

“Good,” Clara says, thrusting a piece of yarn at him. “Hold this end.”

He does without thinking, and Clara goes to find the other one, weaving the end piece through the loose tangle. He watches her fingers, deft and clumsy in turns, and they sit quietly.

“How did this get so...” he wants to know.

“Your sister, honestly,” Clara says with a shrug.

John snorts. “If there’s one thing my sister has, it’s fine motor skill. Somehow I doubt it.”

“No really,” Clara says, narrow mouth curving upward. “She does it every couple days. She thinks she’s sneaky.”

John wonders for the second time if he’s imagined her wrong all these months. When Harry first mentioned her, it was with her usual sighing wistfulness. His sister was built for romances: her capacity for romantic whims and sweeping gestures bordered on nauseating. John had always thought it trite, the way Harry fell and fell and fell in love, usually with girls that John finds cheerful but hollow. He’d assumed Harry’s latest conquest was more of the same. The way Clara dips the sofa beside him, he doesn’t think she’s hollow.

Something about their house hurts his eyes. Their colors are too saturated. He feels lurching, like the stop-start of fretful dreams, Clara’s voice echoes too loudly in his head when she says, “I’ll be starting dinner soon, if you’d like to help.”

John makes an ahh noise, but catches himself; it becomes ahh--ve course in his mouth. Clara tilts her bundle of yarn towards him, offering. He starts to reach out for it with slow hands, and then holds it, dutifully.

“This green is nice,” he says to have something to say.

“I’ve been telling Harry for ages that I’d make her something, but I seem to be more interested in untangling yarn than actually making something with it,” Clara says, laughing at herself, before gesturing at John’s bag. “May I?”

John nods and she pulls out the things inside one at a time, seeds, twine, labels, little degradable starter pots he can bury after they take root without having to pull them up, and last --

“Oh, John, you can’t just leave your cutting in the bag!” Clara shoots up, like she’s reacting to some emergency. John wonders if his alarm-reflexes will atrophy soon.

Clara springs into the kitchen on a body that has lost all of the floppy, earned laziness she’d put off in waves just minutes earlier as she fills a glass from the tap and sticks the short branch with two leaves into it, like the budget version of a single rose in a narrow vase.

“Do you have special instructions for this one?” she asks.

He does. Mike gave him several. He’d brought him to his house, his own back yard, the scraggly plant, looking ambiguously half shrub and half tree and he’d chosen a new stem, but mature enough that the stem cracked with a dry sound under Mike’s pruning shears. He’d looked at the strange, gnarled shrub with something like fondness.

John nods, touches his pocket. “I have a list.”

“What kind of plant is it?” Clara asked, probing it’s little furled green leaves.

“I’m not sure.” It looks frail in the cup, and a little silly. John has a moment where he doubts its ability to grow roots. It’s like snipping a lock of hair and expecting to reverse-engineer a person. How can it possibly still be living?

“Well, this will be exciting,” Clara says, touching it with her fingernail.

“I think the whole point is not to be,” John says, cracking a smile.

“Oh, John. Just because you’re not running around in the desert doesn’t mean you’re done being excited.”

“Sounds pretty apt to me,” he says.

In the morning, Clara pokes her head into the spare bedroom and asks him if he wants any help before she goes to work. John shakes his head mutely, still staring at the ceiling. The whole room is freshly painted, a muzzled blue with white curtains, his small box of things still sitting unopened by the door. The only thing he’s moved is his handgun, which he’s relocated to under the mattress.

Harry would skin him alive if she knew about it.

When he finally gets up, Harry is still sleeping. He can hear her delicate snore from the kitchen as he makes himself a cup of coffee. Just as he’s pouring, his hand gives a violent tremor. “Bloody hell,” he murmurs, dabbing at the splatter with the towel tucked into the handle of the stove.

This is your life, John Watson, he thinks. Instead of holding the blood in some disaster’s torn body with your bare hands, you’re spilling coffee on solid ground.

He distracts himself from his humiliation with the menial task of planting radishes. At ten thirty, Harry comes out in her nightshirt and a towel wrapped around her head. “Clara tried to grow flowers there,” she says, casually. “But she gets bored with things. She let them die.”

John shrugs. “I doubt I’ll be able to keep these alive, even if I stay interested.”

“You might be surprised,” she says, both pixie hands wrapped around a sweating glass of lemonade. “I was pretty determined not to survived secondary school, and look at me now.”

John looks at her for a long time, and she doesn’t shirk under the scrutiny. Harry’s always been a source of great pride and great shame for him, because she’s brilliant, she’s fantastic, she’s herself to the bone, and sometimes he thinks: I helped build that. But she’s also self-destructive and riddled anxiety and sometimes he thinks: I helped build that.

Now though, she looks happy. At ease, like she is sometimes when she’s found someone who brings levity into her life. It’s happened before, but there’s never been a house in the country involved. She’s holding down two jobs, a bartending gig she’s had off and on since before uni and working in this trendy twenty four hour library in central London. She looks joyful, and tired in a way she’s earned, and proud of it.

“Look at you now,” John agrees, unfolding himself into a stretch. “Come help me put in these carrots. I only have to deal with them for a month.”

The radishes sprout leaves in a few days. John almost feels excited about it, before the ghost pain in his leg flares up and he has to snarl “You’re not even real,” to his own limb like he’s gone mad.

*

Harry and Clara seem to work wildly different schedules, with Clara lecturing maths and Harry working both jobs, so spends his days with Harry and his evenings with Clara, trying not to feel too cooped up. Sometimes he goes into London with Clara in the mornings, just wandering from place to place like some kind of friendly ghost with a bad leg. She makes good company and if John asks the right questions, he can get her started on a very excitable lecture that he can enjoy from the safety of his own head, encouraging her to continue without actually engaging.

Harry, when she gets up, hours after he does, usually wants to be doing something. She drags him to shops and lunches, and since she’s invited him into her home practically expense free, he tries to pick up the tab more often than not. They both talk about each other, a little: Clara because he’s Harry’s sister and that probably seems like the only common ground they have, but Harry wants to talk about rugby and movies she fancies and if John is reading anything. She remembers his fondness for detective stories and brings him home a box from a paperback trader one day. She tells him she’s read two of them, and if he starts with them, they can talk about them, after.

Thursdays, they seem to align to have some downtime together. Clara invites him to come along to a film with them, but John’s already a middle aged man reduced to staying with his sister and her girlfriend because he can’t afford to be on his own in London; he’s not trying to tag along on their dates, too.

Instead, he stays home and trawls the paper for housing he could possibly afford. He thinks briefly about looking for a flatshare, but then realizes that no one could possibly want him for a flatmate.

As it stands, his sister’s girlfriend wakes up in the morning with rumpled auburn hair gone frizzy at the ends and smiling. Harry goes for jogs in the afternoon before work. John, on the other hand, wakes up trembling and frightened like a child, and regardless of the pain in his leg, seems incapable of keeping himself from pacing. He makes the most tedious click-and-drag around their tiled house, but he can’t seem to stop.

He ends up using the phone in Harry’s kitchen to talk to a woman about a bedsit in London, after fighting with the new mobile Harry’d given him. She doesn’t answer, so he leaves a message, awkward and stilted, but it gets the point across, he thinks: his name is John Watson and he’s looking for accommodations.

He sits down in the kitchen after that, feeling the double edged sword of feeling accomplished for getting such a task over with and pathetic for feeling like making a phone call and leaving a message is such a task.

By the windowsill, over the sink, he can see the little clipping of Mike’s plant, which he’s paid very little attention to for the past week. Already, it seems to have a short tangle of roots in the water, resting against the bottom. He reaches for it, drags it across the counter to himself, and blows lightly across its leaves in a slow, steady stream on a whim.

The little plant, four inches of stem, a few tendrils of pale roots, and three small leaves, flutters more than can be expected for the amount of air circulating past. John frowns, stopping, and the leaves continue to wiggle hopefully for another twenty or thirty seconds as he looks on, puzzled, before they taper off, eventually coming to rest. Coming to droop, actually.

John blows across them again, and they move in a way he can only describe as joyful before he stands up abruptly, thinking, you really have gone mad, Watson.

*

“I haven’t started the journal,” John tells Ella.

She nods. “But the other things we talked about? The breathing?”

John had forgotten about the breathing. “Yes,” he agrees. “Every night. And I, ah, started a little garden.”

“I can see you’re getting a little sun,” Ella says with a soft smile. “What about your nightmares?”

“Ah. Persistent,” he says.

“And the pain?”

John’s face must tell Ella everything she wants to know, because instead of waiting for him to answer, she moves on. “How about your sister? Are the two of you getting along?”

“We are, actually.”

“You seem surprised.”

“I am. Harry and I have been at each other’s throats since, well, since… since she came out, I guess.”

Ella scratches a quick note, and John realizes what he’s just said. “No,” he insists, “Not like that. I came out first and she was older. Our parents were… terrible. And then she came tumbling out the of closet, you know, five years after it would have been helpful.”

“If your parents weren’t understanding with you, it stands to reason that she didn’t want to tell them.” Ella says in a reasonable tone.

“But she could have told me,” he says, because he’s been thinking about it for almost two decades now.

Ella nodes her understanding. “And now?”

John scratches his ear. “Now she’s got a girlfriend who makes her a proper fry-up in the morning and leaves it in the warmer for her. And she’s … more settled than I’ve ever seen her. We’re becoming friends again.”

“Have you talked about how long you’ll stay with her?”

“No, but I’ve been looking for a bedsit,” John says.

“It’s rather soon, don’t you think? Especially if the two of you are getting along.”

“The three of us,” John corrects. “Clara’s a breath of fresh air. I think she’s a lot of the reason Harry and I aren’t at each other’s throats.”

“Even more reason to linger a while.”

John looks down. “They’re very happy,” he explains. He wonders if Ella knows what he means, if Ella knows anything about feeling like other people’s colour saturation is off balance; about feeling like you’re made of radio static. The noise of his own existence is causing him a headache.

After that, he doesn’t have much to contribute; under Ella’s direction, they do some visualization work meant to calm his anxiety, but mostly John just sees the back of his eyelids.

*

Clara and John wait up for Harry to get off work one night, starting her favorite dish at almost midnight so it’ll be getting out when she comes home.

“No, stop,” Clara says, laughing, as John attempts to stir. “It’s like you’ve never held a utensil before.”

John grins sheepishly. “Have you met Harry? She was a bit of a control freak growing up.”

Clara takes the bowl from him, grinning and pushing him back over to the barstool that seems to have no purpose besides being a viewing area for one person to watch the other person cook. “I have, but tell me more about Harriet when she was younger.”

John sits down. “I don’t know,” he says, scratching his neck. “She was just my sister. I wasn’t a huge fan of her. She was a girl and I thought she was lame, but she was older. All of my mates wanted to shag her.”

“I’ll bet,” Clara says. “There’s this picture of her in this dress, it’s got daisies all over it. I found it the first time I really started digging through her social media stuff and I was like, I am definitely going to tap that.”

“Ew. That’s my lame sister you’re talking about,” John says, putting the spoon to his mouth.

When Harry gets home, eyeliner smudged and hair as droopy as the white flag of surrender, Clara looks even more excited. “Harriet!” she says, bounding to meet her in the doorway like a puppy.

“It’s half-past twelve. How are you so chipper?” Harry says, huffing, but when Clara leans down to kiss her, Harry accepts it with no fuss, bringing one hand to Clara’s neck.

John has to look away, turning his head to the sink instead, where he notices the little cutting again, which looks… significantly larger than it had last time. John reaches out and holds the glass, peering at the growing tangle of wet roots from the side of the glass, and the new little furled green leaf, darker than the others.

John blows an experimental breath, just a quick one, across it out of curiosity. When he finishes the plant continues to hop around for several moments before settling, and John goes back to examining it.

“Wow,” Harry says, when she’s done letting Clara drink her in. “That’s come a long way pretty quickly. Maybe it’s time to put that thing in soil.”

“Maybe,” John says, still staring. “Watch this.”

He blows on the plant, which remains sullenly, stubbornly still. John frowns, and blows another, harder breath. Not only does the plant fail to do the joyous wiggle, which John is prepared to admit perhaps he imagined, it remains rigidly locked in place. A thin leaf should move at least a little by virtue of lung power.

“What am I looking at?” Harry asks.

She and Clara are holding hands. John suddenly pushes the glass back onto the counter. “Nothing,” John says. “Goodnight you two.”

“John! You should eat!” Clara says, but he doesn’t turn around.

In his room, he pulls out a biro and the spiral notebook Ella gave him when he told her about his mistrust of a journal on the internet, where any stranger was welcome to tell him how pathetic he was. Nothing ever happens to me, he writes. Except lately I am imagining things.

*

After thinking about it, John sends an email from Harry’s computer. It takes him a clumsy hour to find Mike Stamford’s email through the Bart’s teacher directory, but finally he does. Feeling triumphant, he writes, Mike, mate, what did you send me home with? The little bugger has been one long growth spurt.

After a few days, Mike says, I thought you’d get a kick out of it. The parent plant is a bit of a twat, though. Pints soon?

John says of course because that’s what you’re supposed to say to uni mates, but he never gets around to actually scheduling such an outing, or wanting to.

*

He moves out before the radishes are good to eat. Harry and Clara are still in the floating first-year stage of a relationship with real potential: John is constantly thrown into chiaroscuro with them, the sad hermit they bring along on outings, dragging his leg behind him like so much dead meat. They hardly need him getting frozen in the doorway and yelping when the light flickers.

He wants to weep at the frustration that he spent so much time not speaking to Harry when he was solid, and strong and brave, and now that he’s broken, she’s seeing him more than ever.  

“The other option,” Clara says, when he tells her that it’s time to leave, “is that you could not go.”

He smiles with half his face at his newest, well, friend. Huh. John didn’t expect that, but he’s grateful all the same. “You’ve been lovely letting me muck around underfoot. But, ah.”

“I get it,” she says, but she moves over to straighten out his bed, smoothing her hands across the duvet. She puts on a pleasant expression like a sundress, thin and billowy, “a young single man doesn’t need to be bringing ladies back to his sister’s house.”

Harry, leaning in the doorway, laughs a little. “You’d be surprised,” she says, waggling her eyebrows at Clara. “Our parents weren’t very supportive when he was a lad. Where else could he have possibly gone when he was ready to snog his first boyfriend.”

John lets out a rumbling, good natured groan. If there’s one thing that he can rely on Harry for, it’s keeping everyone from having to make unnecisarry emotional announcements. It is, frankly, one of her best qualities. Relieved, he grins, “And here I’ve been so well-behaved all month not talking about your uni days.”

Clara looks put out. “I’ve been good to you, haven’t I? Why would you hold out on me like that?”

Harry moves to Clara, slings an arm around her neck. “Sorry, love, sounds like it’s time for Johnny dear to get out before the gloves come off,” she says, finishing with a playful smack of a kiss against Clara’s temple.

Clara hovers to help him pack, and he’s prepared to be embarrassed that she’s soon to witness the amazing one adult life fitting into one tiny box trick when he realizes he’s acquired more than a few new possession since he’s come to stay with Harry and Clara, and when he’s put back his few shirts, jumpers, and trousers back into the first box, Clara has to rummage around in their attic to get him another for his paperback books, and the Kiss the Cook apron Clara picked out for him, and the RAMC mug he’d seen at a rummage sale.

In the end, he has a canvas duffel, and two boxes, and he feels a little bit of strange pride before he goes to fumble them into the back seat of Clara’s car and his knee gives out.

*

Three days later, his phone rings, and if it hadn’t come from Harry, an obviously important gift that she’d given him with no reservations, he would have let her go to voicemail. Instead, he presses the cool plastic to his face. “Hallo.”

“You forgot something.”

John’s heart gives an unevern thump as he reassures himself that his gun made it back into his bag before he moved in. “Yeah?”

“Well, first there’s this whole damn garden,” she jokes.

“Clara said that she’s claiming all of that until she kills everything,” he says, looking at the grimy ceiling of his new bedsit, smaller even than the room he had in uni.

“And there’s the weed in the pot, in the kitchen.”

“It’s not a weed,” John says, defensive. And then, flushing, “You guys can keep it. Clara bought it the nice pot, anyway.”

“It looks pitiful,” Harry says, and John can hear her scowling. She’s never taken failure lightly. “It’s only been three days -- before which it had been growing very, very rapidly -- and now it looks like it’s in mourning."

“Ah--” John hesitates, his tongue pressed to the inside of his front teeth, and Harry decides for him. “I’m bringing it by after work.”

*

“You weren’t kidding,” John says, when he lets her in, clutching the little yellow pot to her chest. His little plant, which for the past month had been making leaps and bounds every day until it was almost a solid meter tall now looks stooped, and browning, like a leftover salad. “How’d you manage to do so much damage in three days?”

“It just misses you, I guess, Johnny,” she cooes, peering around him.

“Don’t look,” John grouses. “It’ll only bring you down.”

Harry scowls at his narrow bed and the hot plate he has instead of a stove. Clearly, she isn’t impressed. “Come home, you berk.”

“There’s no way you watered him.” John says, instead of responding.

“I did water … it,” she emphasizes.

“ _It_. There’s no way you watered it,” John amends.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” she smirks, and John misses her as soon as she goes, but beneath that, there is gratitude. Three months ago, he couldn’t have guessed that he’d miss Harry as soon as she stepped out of his dwelling. Then again, three months ago he’d been days from taking sniper fire to the shoulder in a shot that he would have described as near-miraculous if being on the business end of it hadn’t kept him from generous thoughts towards the shooter.

He puts the little plant on the bedside table, waters it from the tap and his cupped hands, cleans his gun, makes tea, and paces around. It’s not really a life, but it is one way to pass an hour. When he’s done all of the pacing his leg can stand, he sits down on the bed. A flick of movement beside him catches his eye, and with a stretch that seems almost deliberate, his plant uncurls from its wilted hunch right before his eyes.

“You’ve got to stop doing that.”

All of the leaves wave at him collectively, and he turns it around on his bedside table, before feeling like a right tit that he’s arbitrarily decided that one side of the plant is the face.

*

Something wakes him.

A rustling has him coming up from sleep swiftly, but then the creak of the floorboards gives him that final jolt. “Who’s there?” John demands, his eyes being stubbornly slow to adjust.

There is a man in the shadows -- John can see the wild coastline-twisted shape of his hair in silhouette and not much else.  

The man -- hulking but narrow, pale skin visible in the bent, watered down light coming from the street outside -- comes a step closer to John’s bed and John yelps, armed with the new knowledge that the man is nude.

“The light here is terrible,” the man complains.

John is puzzled, and beginning to question his lucidity. He feels awake, but he’s been wrong before, on several trips back to Afghanistan. “Pardon?”

“The light, John! It’s simply inadequate.”

John is now sitting up, bedsheets pushed to the bottom of the bed as he launches himself up. “Now wait just a minute. Who are you? And why do you know my name? And… why are you complaining about the light? It’s nighttime!”

“Dull, dull,” he says, not answering at all. “We’ve been flatmates for two months, of course I know your name, and the light may not be an issue right now but I am accustomed to the optimum angle of sunlight from sunrise to around one PM and this window is simply not adequate.”

John surges for his doorway, slapping his hand against the switch and turning on the stingy overhead light, and stares.

“What,” he barks finally. That’s it. His brain has collapsed under the weight of his PTSD, simply taken its last paycheck and clocked out, because there is no other explanation for this man in his bedsit, so small that he seems to have filled it all by himself, feet filthy with mud and hair an akimbo tangle of greenery.

“Oh, don’t be daft, John,” the man scoffs, and John takes a moment to study the expanse of his shoulders, dappled with verdant patches and the occasional button mushroom.

John is at his best in moments of clear and present danger. Apparently, he’s not too shabby in the face of utter absurdity, either. His eyes flick to the nightstand, where the little yellow pot sits, empty, with ruffled soil, and back to the pale stranger in his room. “Nope,” he says, grinning. “Full marks for creativity, though. The moss knees are a particularly nice touch.”

The man before him huffs out a little annoyed breath, glares deeply at John and moves towards his nightstand. “You’re dismissed, human,” he says, and surges up, planting a foot on John’s nightstand.

“Did you just--” John starts to say, but he doesn’t have time to finish asking before he takes another step, his feet unravelling into threads like roots, and in the space between a blink, he is gone. John is once again alone, in his bedsit, just himself and a small, potted weed.

John looks at the little plant for five minutes before he goes to the door to turn off the light. He makes his way to his bed in the dark, guided only by the little pinpoint of light on his phone’s charger. He leans over after he gets himself settled, blowing a little breath across the tops of the leaves, hearing a soft ruffle in response.

“I’ll get you a lamp,” he promises, grinning, and goes to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is basically _how John met plantlock._ I'm listing it as complete, but I suspect there will be ficlets. Lots and lots of ficlets. If that's interesting, feel free to subscribe, or come hang out with me [here](katiewont.tumblr.com) on the tumblr.
> 
> Also, the wonderful Risah made[this lovely thing, plantlock in his chair, with his new lamp](http://imrisah.tumblr.com/post/88263652766/commission-for-katiewont-plantlock-chillin-under).


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